Police officer who found family photo on 9/11 found his master alive
- Former police officer Brandon del Pozo says he found a family photo at the site of the 9/11 attacks.
- Del Pozo says that 20 years later, he rediscovered photography and shared the photo on Facebook.
- Now he says that he found the family in the photo and that they are all safe and sound.
Former NYPD officer Brandon del Pozo told Insider that he was in Lower Manhattan 20 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed.
Del Pozo said that while walking to ground zero to see if there were survivors in need of help, he looked down and saw a photograph of the family at his feet.
“It seemed wrong to leave him on the ground,” del Pozo said of the photograph. “I thought that if he just lay there, he would be lost forever, but it was also a very personal subject.”
So del Pozo – a patrolman in Brooklyn at the time – picked it up and put it in his police notebook, he said.
Two decades later, del Pozo said he found the family in a photograph after rediscovering the image in his basement and by posting this on Facebook…
When the post, which was shared by 41,000 people at the time of writing, went viral. Del Pozo said several people contacted him via Facebook and Twitter, claiming they could identify the person in the photo. After some research, del Pozo said he was able to connect with the person in the photo on LinkedIn. Around the same time, the woman in the photo reached out to del Pozo on Facebook, del Pozo said, and the former police officer said he spoke to both her and her husband.
Del Pozo said family members whose identities he did not disclose because he said they asked him to protect their privacy are all safe and sound.
From a conversation with the man in the photo, del Pozo said that he learned that his father and husband were working on the 40th floor of the One World Trade Center, and that the image was hanging in his office.
Del Pozo said the man had planned to go to a conference at Windows on the World, the observatory at the top of the tower, on the morning of September 11, 2001, but on September 10, he was sent on business to London. that everyone at that conference died.
On Sunday, after speaking to the person in the photo, del Pozo shared tweet with an update for his followers.
“He is retired, still married, and his three boys are now grown men, healthy and prosperous,” he wrote.
Del Pozo also quoted an email that he said the person sent him. According to del Pozo, “life was good after 9/11, which separates us from people who are no less worthy, but simply less fortunate,” the person wrote. “Fate was kind: it was not time to leave.”
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached, del Pozo said he came across a photograph while looking for something else: a diary entry he wrote on his 27th birthday, the day before the attacks.
In a post he shared with Insider, he wrote that if he died the next morning, he would live a good life.
Del Pozo’s diary entry the day before 9/11.
Brandon del Pozo
